Concerned about compliance? Plan for the great purge.

Compliance is becoming more complicated and time consuming. More than 100,000 international laws and regulations are potentially relevant to Forbes Global 1000 companies. It’s no wonder that more and more organizations are facing non-compliance issues and more litigation.

Doculabs recently partnered with EFM to develop a survey for its membership database, which is made up of IT leaders at organizations of all sizes from across all industries. The goal was to learn more about how firms are managing their core business applications and the data that resides in them. In a recent article by Joe Shepley regarding the survey, ‘Survey Says…You’re Out of Compliance’, Mr. Shepley focuses on one question, How Do You Purge Your Data Once It’s Passed Its Legal or Operational Life? The response was telling and somewhat alarming. “Only one-third of respondents reported doing regular purging, whether automated (21 percent) or manually (12 percent). The rest reported purging on an ad hoc basis, whether automated (10 percent) or manually (26 percent).”

The ramifications of a lack of consistent purging according to published policies and procedures results in non-compliance with record keeping conventions or legally based on how judges interpret the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

Mr. Shepley sums up the article by stating, “So what these numbers suggest is that two-thirds of respondents are not compliant with either record keeping conventions or the FRCP — a scary, scary number.”

It is important to note that this survey was focused on finding out how organizations are managing their core business applications and the data that resides in them. I would be curious to know if the survey also included the purging of unstructured and semi-structured content.

What about your organization? Do you have rules and procedures for purging both data and unstructured/semi-structured content?